In case you missed it, Equal Pay Day was yesterday. It has been a nationally recognized holiday since 1996 and despite the fact that President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law in 2009, women in the U.S. are still paid 79% of what men make in comparable roles. That’s 79 cents to every dollar that a man makes, and the numbers are even lower for black and Hispanic women.

State Senator Patricia Jehlen (D) represents the Second Middlesex District in Massachusetts and is a co-sponsor of the state’s Pay Equity Bill that unanimously passed the Senate last January – Photo by Genevieve DiNatale

Patricia Jehlen is a state senator from Massachusetts and is a co-sponsor of the state’s Pay Equity bill.

In addition to ensuring equal pay for equal work, the bill prevents human resources from asking women their pay history in job interviews, which helps women from being discriminated against for their pay history.

It also promotes transparency, allowing women to ask coworkers about their salary without repercussions.

But that’s not all!

She said, “One of the best things is that if a company doesn’t want to be sued for having unequal pay, then they can prevent that by doing a self study and many businesses have found that by looking at their pay practices, they have found inequities that they have then corrected.”

Women in the workforce and in politics are discriminated against in part because the issues ascribed to the gender are not associated with the public sphere – Source: ivn.us

Gender roles and perceptions of women’s skills have been shown to modify the behavior of otherwise intelligent women in the workforce and academia, limiting earning potential.

This also happens to women in the political arena.

“Social characteristics get connected to these bodily characteristics and so when we look at certain characteristics and we know their gender, we make certain assumptions about how good of a candidate they are, what types of things they are interested in, who they are going to represent and the experiences they have had,” said politics expert Samara Klar.

Genocide has taken place in many countries ranging from Rwanda, Armenia, Yugoslavia, and the Sudan. And although the definition of genocide is somewhat dubious, the term itself is generally associated with the mass murder of a particular ethnic group (although this could be potentially misleading and perhaps biased in certain contexts).

This hutu man was brutally tortured in a concentration camp during the Rwanda genocide in 1994 – Source: faceofmalawai.com

What causes genocide?

Politics expert Jennifer Hoewe at the University of Alabama said genocide happens when members of a perceived in group decide to take action against an out group within the same ethnicity.

“People we see as similar to us are in groups and sometimes what we do is look at other people as part of an out group. If you are not similar to me, you are some kind of other, an out group. As a member of an out group, I might be more likely to take action against you.”

The “action” that Hoewe mentions may manifest itself as genocide. This happens when the in group turns outward on itself. This occurrence is generally attributed to economic hegemony within a specific ethnic group that leads to conflict.

And although the Tutsis and Hutus share a common language, culture and country, the only discernible difference between them is physical. Tutsis are taller and thinner than Hutus, with some saying their origins lie in Ethiopia.

Like this artists’ rendition of a man in a box, in group dynamics that become divisive hegemonies within themselves can lead to genocide Photo by Genevieve DiNatale

In political psychology, racism is often attributed to in-group and out group dynamics – Source: bangordailynews.com

Experts say racism is certainly not a part of the past, even though America’s first black president is finishing up his second term.And there is a psychological reason for this too.

“All people define their identities based on social cues that they receive throughout their lives.You and me and everybody have internal identities about the groups that we belong to.I am a woman, I am white, I am Latina, I go to Stanford, I live in California, etc.” said Samara Klar, a politics professor with a specialty in race relations at the University of Arizona.

The Civil Rights Movement may have ushered in social change, but racism is not a thing of the past – Photo by Genevieve DiNatale

“Once those identities are formed they give us ideas about our appropriate behaviors and they signal to us what our in-groups are and what our out groups are. There is some great work by John Turner, a psychologist from many years ago, who showed that with in-group and out group behavior, once those groups are defined, we define the out group as bad.”

And those out groups are often defined by gerrymandering.In 2011, the Justice Department found that a redistricting map in Texas (signed into law by then presidential candidate Rick Perry) was gerrymandered to prevent minorities from electing the candidate of their choice.

The candidates that minorities choose are often limited to the left of the spectrum, too, as can be seen in the chart below:

Populist sentiment arises when there is widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo – Photo by Genevieve DiNatale

Populism has taken hold of the Republican Party this primary season through the likes of Donald Trump. The anti-establishment, but pro-nationalist sentiment expressed by this train of thought can be traced back to Marine Le Pen’s right-wing populist National Front party in France.

UMass politics professor MJ Peterson says that populism can “go off in different directions” one strain can be exclusivist and another can represent the “ordinary forgotten person who wants respect.”

“Populism that becomes exclusive says ‘we need to circle the wagons of the group,’ ‘we need to keep the outsiders out,’ we need to keep the different away and that’s very much what you are getting with Trump,” she said.

“The funny thing is that Trump, for all of his I am going to make Mexico build the wall,

which is interesting, why should Mexico build the wall?” she said. “Has not been all that clear in his economic policies.”

Matthew Brench is the Vicar at the Grace Anglican Church in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. His approach to populism is more behavioral and less political. He says that populism arises from people’s likelihood to agree with one another when interacting in group settings.

“…people tend to be very community-oriented,” he said. “And that means the more people you put in one conversation, the more likely they’re going to tend to agree with each other. Especially true on the internet where we’re much more able to seek out already-like-minded folks and, for lack of a more charitable phrase, join the herd.”

But why are we experiencing this anti-populist sentiment now and not twenty years ago? Matthew Schiller a teacher at the Advanced Math and Science Academy in Marlborough, Massachusetts, says it comes down to technology and the ease of information exchange that has been facilitated by the internet.

“People are fed up and this is happening because of technology, Facebook and social media. If it was in the paper, people truly didn’t know, but now you have Facebook and everything is delivered so fast. People are more informed, whether the information is correct or not, people are just more informed. So if you have more information, they are going to be more upset,” he said.

A recent study conducted by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, found that there are distinct disparities in the moralities of liberals and conservatives. As it turns out, liberals value what Haidt calls “harm” or “care” more than conservatives and conservatives value “authority” more than their liberal counterparts.

Furthermore, the role that fatherhood and family plays in conservative politics also creates conservatives too. Apparently, stricter fathers raise more conservative children than affectionate parents.

But what moral underpinning would make a Republican oppose abortion, but not support prenatal care or welfare?

MJ Peterson, a politics professor from UMass Amherst explains this phenomenon by saying that conservatives are more likely to adhere to and respect roles established by in-group dynamics whereas liberal are more independent.

“In traditional conservatism,” she said, “there is much more of a notion of the group identity, of hierarchies within the group with you in a role that you should stick to, but liberals as a philosophy tend to be more individualistic.”

Nationalism is an iteration of social identity – Photo by Genevieve DiNatale

Do you love your country?

Well, nationalism means a lot more than loving your country, according to the latest theories from the burgeoning field of political psychology.

“Nationalism is one way of promoting group identity. Instead of focusing on an ethnic group, racial group, gender, an occupational group, or religion, it puts the focus on a nation,” said MJ Peterson, a political science professor at UMass Amherst.

These theories are all dependent on how the term nationalism is defined. And according to Peterson, it can take on two different meanings. Nationalism can arise from shared ethnicity or shared territory within a nation-state. The latter arises from living within a shared territory and develops from the way in which citizens identify with the state’s political community.

Peterson said that nationalism developed in Western Europe during the time of the French Revolution (1789-1799) and was also evident in the Soviet Union. The rhetoric of the French Revolution included statements like “the children of the father land” and “citizens of the republic,” but the revolution itself was very much bound up in the French as a distinct group.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was composed of many different ethnicities, among them Russians, Ukranians, Kazaks, and Chechnians. The rhetoric of the government, said Peterson, was to say “we are all engaged in a project of socialism.”

“But at the same time,” she said. “The government stamped everyone’s passport with their ethnicity.”

However, on a more basic psychological level, she says that nationalism all relates back to infancy.

“If you think about it, humans do actually like to be in groups. This goes back to our earliest experience. When we are a baby we are helpless and we are helpless for a long time. So there is a certain type of ‘groupiness’ inherent in being human.”